As seven alien races struggle to co-exist in an uneasy alliance, the Inter-Stellar Union sends Union Guard agents on missions to preserve the crucial balance. These specialized operatives must do what regional security cannot, dealing with smugglers, pirates, terrorists, and even greater challenges in order to bring stability to a universe that needs it desperately. Without the Union Guard, the races will not be prepared to face a looming alien threat they can only hope to defeat together.

Wednesday, April 26, 2017

Behind the Scenes (part 3)

Happy Accidents! I had been intending
to place the Union Guard “UG” logo at the upper left of the page
near the “Agent Profile” title, but when I imported the logo, it
was huge and almost covered the entire page. I looked at it, and
thought, “Wait a minute, that's actually pretty cool!” I changed
the opacity of the giant UG logo and it “faded” underneath the
details of the character sheet, appearing in the background, like a
giant Union Guard watermark. People at the con and friends I emailed
my prototype page to really liked the look with the logo. As I
continued to work on the design, I recalled that over the years,
there were a few areas on the sheet that no one ever used, so I
scrubbed those spots entirely. Another problem with the original
sheet was the confusion around how the attribute dice and skills
worked. In my redesign, I pushed everything over to the far, far
left, with the boxes on the left column plus a vertical line
separating them from the skill list. I also grouped Ranged and Melee
Dodge with skills, because even though you can't add ranks to them
like other skills, they are still affected by wound penalties just
like all other skills. Seeing them positioned there was to remind
players: yes, your Dodge is still a skill, so when you are wounded,
you'll be less...dodgy. At JohnCon, the gamers totally got it, and
one gamer also had a great suggestion—she said that the order of
the attributes at the top of the page made her feel like the skills
should be ordered in a manner similar to the progression of
attributes. It made sense, and they weren't in any particular order
originally, so I regrouped the skills into roughly the same order:
skills associated with Strength and Reflexes were grouped first, and
Influence skills were last, to mirror the attribute list at the top
of the page.